Jun 13th, 2008
The 5% Plan: Week Two
If you’re wondering where Kyle of Rather-Be-Shopping.com and his usual guest post is, he (and his post) are camping! So we’re giving him a much deserved break and reviewing my goal of using less gas…
I’m continuing to see what I can do to reduce my gas usage by 5%. In my first week of trying to cut my fuel use, I cut my mileage almost 5%, but my fuel use reduction was only about 2.5%. This week I went back to my original route to work, although I did have one social outing in addition to my usual driving, so let’s take a look at the results.
For the week ending June 7, 2008, I ended up driving 268.1 miles, which is, unfortunately, considerably more than my goal–20.4 miles, which is 100% attributable (actually it was more than 100% of the excess mileage!) to my attending a social event on Saturday night. My estimated miles per gallon for that time frame was 25.32 miles per gallon, which was better than either my first week or baseline week in this trial. However, because I drove more miles, my total gas used was 10.59 miles, which was actually slightly more than my baseline; this is less than 1% more gas than baseline, but almost 6% more gas than I wanted to use.
So far, I’ve not been successful in this attempt. The first week I was able to get my total miles driven within my target range but my miles per gallon was lower than planned; the second week my miles per gallon was better than ever but my total mileage was higher than expected. Using what I’ve learned to date this week, my plan is for one day a week to be a total “no drive” day, and that looks like it’ll be this Saturday. I think I’ve found the best route to work, which is the majority of my driving, and the times I travel are pretty fixed. My driving style is already getting me close to 10% better miles per gallon than the truck is rated for, so it’s pretty clear that if I’m going to meet this goal it’s really going to come down to actually driving less.
Let’s see how things go in week three!
[...] The 5% Plan: Week Two If you’re wondering where Kyle of Rather-Be-Shopping.com and his usual guest post is, he (and his post) are camping! [...]